… the investigation of Russian intervention is not just a disgrace, it’s a collective eclipse of reason, it’s lunacy.

Via The Economist (to which I recently subscribed because it’s fabulously written and reports—imagine!—REAL NEWS FROM ACROSS THE WORLD:

BUZZFEED recently broke an explosive story about Russia’s meddling in America’s elections. On August 3rd 2016, it reported, just as the presidential race was entering its final phase, the Russian foreign ministry wired nearly $30,000 through a Kremlin-backed bank to its embassy in Washington, DC, with a remarkable description attached: “To finance election campaign of 2016”. Worse still, this was only one of 60 transfers that were being scrutinised by the FBI. Similar transfers were made to other countries. The story created a buzz, but not of the kind its authors hoped for. “Idiots. The Russian election of 2016, not the US one, you exceptionalist morons,” tweeted a prominent Russian journalist, pointing out that Russia too held parliamentary elections in 2016 and that the money was most probably sent to the embassies to organise the polling for expatriates. This was confirmed by the Russian foreign ministry. BuzzFeed updated its story, but did not take it down.

The author of that tweet was not a Kremlin agent but Leonid Bershidsky, a sharp-tongued writer for Bloomberg News and co-founder of Vedomosti, Russia’s leading business newspaper. “The Trump-Russia story is becoming surreal,” he wrote in a follow-up column while also offering a disclaimer: “I grew up and lived most of my life in Moscow. My perspective is that of a guy from Russia, who hates the current government there but loves the country itself.” For Russian liberals, the spectacle of American commentators imitating the Kremlin, which has long blamed every problem on America, is dispiriting.

Such people have no illusions about the Kremlin, and most of them have been on the receiving end of its disinformation and repression. Leonid Volkov, the campaign manager for Russia’s foremost opposition politician, Alexei Navalny, who—like his boss—has been in jail more than once, wrote recently, only half in jest: “I can’t be silent any longer…I understand that American society and the liberal media, stuck somewhere between denial and anger, still cannot reflect upon and accept Hillary Clinton’s defeat in the election a year ago. But the investigation of Russian intervention is not just a disgrace, it’s a collective eclipse of reason, it’s lunacy.” …